


Drink Away the Memory

by Lucky107



Series: Sinners, Saints, and Survivors [1]
Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mischief, Murder, Spoilers, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 04:31:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7876624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucky107/pseuds/Lucky107
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All that's left where a woman once stood is an old newspaper, smeared in mud and rain water in the filthy streets of the backwater.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Whiskey Lullaby - Brad Paisley & Alison Krauss - 2004

The news comes suddenly at the break of dawn.

Thieves' Landing is generally a busy place in the early morning hours - high traffic is a result of those who spent the night on either side of the lawless territory awaiting daylight - and Sorcha can't blame them.  It's not the place she would have chosen to call home, had she anywhere else to go.

In fact, she's itching to leave, even if that means taking to camping in the bayou like those busy travellers and robbing the stray passerby at gunpoint.

It isn't easy to find honest work when your only skill is shooting men, but she tries.

And Sorcha will continue trying until she finds her ticket out because allowing herself to be left in a shithole like Thieves' Landing was easily the worst decision of her life - and that's saying something.

 _It'll be good fer ya to live somewheres steady fer a change_ , that drunken Irish bastard had insisted.  Sorcha had only shook her head in disbelief; he knew nothing, let alone what was best for her.  _The boys 'n' I'll be back before ya even know we're gone_.

Those so-called friends left Thieves' Landing a little over a week ago now, off on some mission to procure narcotics from 'a friend of a friend' and Sorcha has yet to hear a word from them since.

Approaching a man hidden away in the shadows of the old Dixie Rose brothel, the Scotsman presses a coin into his gloved hand and snatches her purchase from him before he's given a chance to rob her.  His eyes glisten with mischief, but she spits at his shoe and sends him searching elsewhere for a poke.

Sorcha doesn't venture far from the alleyway she bought the paper in before she flips through to browse the witty advertisements.

As someone who doesn't read so well - and doesn't participate in local politics - news about Mexican civil wars and election campaigns mean little.  It's always the same shit, just a different newspaper... and another wasted dollar, but sometimes the advertisements provide a laugh.

The first entry of the miscellany section jumps out at her and reads: _Alwyn Lloyd, believed to be of Welsh origin, died by gunshot in Armadillo, New Austin._

Sorcha stifles a chuckle - she's only met one Welshman in all her years in America and he's a scrapper if ever there was one.  The idea of him being shot down in some piss-poor dump like Armadillo strikes her fancy, but she doesn't linger too long on the idea.

It's not Welsh, it's some other poor bastard.

However, the notice immediately below it reads: _Leander Holland, known to friends by the name of French, was found dead in Armadillo, New Austin._

Wasting no time, Sorcha steals a horse from the nearest passerby with no grace or kindness.  She tosses the stranger down into the street with nothing to break his fall but the shluck left by the rain and then she's gone.  All that's left where a woman once stood is an old newspaper, smeared in mud and rain water in the filthy streets of the backwater.

\- - -

If the articles are only reaching the morning paper today, they must be recent.

That's the logic that drives Sorcha's frantic ride to Armadillo first thing in the morning.  The lack of one particular fellow who should have been in the company of the now-deceased leaves plenty of unanswered questions running like a goddamn freight train through Sorcha's mind.

And none of the possible scenarios playing out make any sense.

It takes her just shy of an hour to reach Armadillo, spurring the stolen horse as hard as the beast will let her.  She doesn't even stop to hitch it, leaping right out of the saddle as the horse runs off without her.  Desperately, she pushes her way into the Marshal's office.

Two lazy deputies smack cards down on a makeshift table with makeshift whiskey, their guns set aside should an emergency to arise.  But it's the older fellow behind the desk that catches her attention when he asks, "Can I help you?"

"The bodies of French 'n' Welsh," Sorcha demands, slapping her hands down onto his desk.

The deputies play on, completely unaware of the rising tension.  That, or they just don't give a damn.  "Excuse me?"

"Infermation," Sorcha explains, the words flying out of her mouth with little thought for structure.  "A-Alwyn - a fella named Alwyn - and French.  I saw the piece in the paper, they died 'ere recently, 'n' I need to know why."

"I don't know much," the aging gentleman says around a cigar in his mouth.  He's relatively calm despite his apparent skepticism.  "I took a look a the bodies where they were found, out back in the stable.  They were both shot and they were both armed at the time of that shooting."

"Armed?"  The Scotsman asks.  "'gainst who?"

"Numerous witness reports seem to implicate two men seen riding away that evening—a gunslinger and a scraggly, drunken fella."  The Marshal stops a minute to put the cigar down.  "It's not a very strong lead when you look at the people in this county, Miss."

But Sorcha doesn't need to hear anymore - she doesn't even stop to thank the man before she's pushing her way back out into the street.

"That fuckin' bastard," she hisses.  "That fuckin' Irish bastard."

\- - -

In her haste, Sorcha never thought to ask the Marshal which direction the men rode off in.

But she knows, in the long run, it doesn't really matter.  Whether anyone has seen - or heard - any accurate information on the whereabouts of her drunken friend won't make a difference.  In the off-chance they did meet, what in the world could she possibly have to say to the slimy bastard?

 _Ya killed me best friends, a filthy piece o' shite!_ or _French 'n' Welsh are dead 'cause o' you!_ just don't do it justice.  When three of the best worst men she's ever known end up killing each other in a vicious scrap, there really are no words.

French and Welsh - and Irish, too - were like brothers to her.

They grew up together, they raised each other, as strangers in a foreign land and their shoddy life on the road together taught them all some valuable lessons.  Apparently, though, it wasn't enough to erase the long-brewing tension building between them.

But what was the final straw?

Why didn't Irish say anything when he left?

Sorcha spends the greater part of her search wallowing in such thoughts, looking high and low to locate the Irishman after having decided he was surely still in New Austin, if not still in Cholla Springs.  And no matter where he manages to hole up, she intends to find him and she give him a piece of what remains of her mind.

Even without words, she's firm in her resolve that these deaths can't just remain unspoken as so many others have over the years.

\- - -

Throwing open Critchley's barn door with both hands and an aggressive shove, Sorcha hollers, "Ya useless shite!"  Her presence doesn't go completely unnoticed, but there's no chipper response.

Irish can't even stand, squinting up at her with an unreadable expression.  "Knew ya'd find me, Scotty."

Sorcha storms across the barn, a fit of fury and grief and aggression.  In a blur, she's grabbing a fistful of Irish's shirt, pulling him to his feet and he doesn't fight back.  "Betcha fuckin' did, ya bastard!  Ya lyin', murderin' bastard!"

The drunkard's expression never falters—there's no regret, no remorse.

No guilt.

"Guess ya already heard," Irish laments, this time putting on a sheepish smile to fend off her looming fist.  "I was goin' to come back 'n' tell ya.  I was."

Sorcha's sober again.  "Ya filled me with yer empty promises 'n' shallow lies - I knew I never shoulda trusted ya!"

That's when, without restraint, she draws her arm back and slings him a good one, right in the nose.  And still, Irish doesn't say a word.  He doesn't fight back and he doesn't protest the assault.  Again.  And again.  She hits the man without restraint and deservingly, he accepts her anger.

"French 'n' Welsh are dead 'n' I find ya pished outta yer mind in some ol' barn...  When were ya gonna tell me, Irish?  When were ya gonna come back 'n' tell me?"

But Irish can't find the words.

He wasn't going to tell her—in fact, if things played out the way he had hoped, Sorcha never would have known and the three of them would have disappeared from her life entirely.  But she's here - and she's here right now, full of grief and anger and disappointment - and he can't even defend himself.

"They weren't good fer ya, Scotty," he tries to reason, but she won't hear it.  Not from him, not like this.  "They weren't good fer any of us."

"Ya have no right to judge 'em when ya didn't even know 'em!"  Rather than resume fisticuffs, however, Sorcha returns her hands to the collar of his shirt.  "Ya ran off to God-knows-where fer four years 'n' then come crawlin' back from bloody Mexico with no explanation - 'n' who do ya think looked out fer me all them years?  It wasn't you!"

"I know that, 'n' I's sorry fer it."

"Ya ain't sorry!  Ya never were 'n' you'll never be!"  When she musters the strength to push the drunkard up against the stable wall, Irish sees for the first time that she's shaking.  Bad.  "Ya can't... ya can't _be_ sorry fer killin' them fellas.   No more lies, Irish."

"It ain't a lie," Irish offers quietly.  "I's gonna tell it all someday, from start to finish, but fer now... ya gotta believe me, Scotty.  They's not the men ya knew.  'n' I's truly sorry fer it."

Releasing her one-time best friend, she turns her face, unwilling to let him see her cry.  "... They finally tried to kill ya."

Irish is silent, but she knows she's hit the nail on the head.  She was the fool, so willfully blind to the mounting hatred and disdain.  When they all left together, it wasn't Irish who thought to kill them - Irish hadn't ever thought to kill anyone.  _That_ part always just sort of happened.  No, when Irish left her in Thieves' Landing that day, he truly believed it would be a short trip.

Nobody speaks for a long time, seating themselves among the horse shit and straw, and for a long time Sorcha Hardie cries.

"Where did we go wrong, Irish?"  The Scotsman whispers.  "... Where did it all go so wrong?"

Another question that Irish can't answer - not that he doesn't want an answer.  For the first time in ten years, there's no 'us' anymore—when they became friends, a family really, Sorcha was seeing the world in colour for the first time.  Suddenly everything is grey again.

"It ain't yer fault, Scotty," Irish explains.  "They'd changed.  They weren't the boys ya knew back then... they weren't the boys who loved ya, either.  They'd always hated me - 'n' that had nothin' to do with you."

\- - -

The night fizzles into a spotty mess of vague and partial memories.

Irish stays, despite his itch to leave, at least until Sorcha finally cries herself to sleep.  He doesn't want to leave Sorcha alone again, but he knows there's nothing left for them without French and Welsh... and even without him, she'll never truly be alone.  Not when, buried somewhere in her heart whiskey-soaked heart, is a fond memory of the hotheaded Welshman and the flighty Frenchman.

By the time Sorcha awakens, the first light of dawn is filtering through the cracks of the old barn and she's no longer angry - no longer guilty.

Even when she wakes up alone.


	2. Chapter 2

The year is 1896.

Conditions in a bunkhouse comprised of three ever-growing peasant families are poor, with no steady means of income and an alcoholic for a father.

His wife, a homely and reserved woman with an aging face, deteriorates from the inside out as the years drift by like a summer breeze.  The process doesn't really sink in until the drunkard passes, leaving behind a broken-hearted widow and half a dozen hungry mouths to feed.

Soon a girl no older than fourteen years old finds herself alone in the cold and cruel streets of the nearby Glasgow.  She begs and she swindles and sometimes she even steals.

Sorcha Hardie's always been a survivor.

\- - -

The 'RMS Carpathia' is what they call her, but the young Scotsman has no interest in an ocean liner.  Instead she's preoccupied with her destination - the great land of opportunity - so she doesn't give a damn how she gets there.

Even if that means being herded like cattle with the rest of the peasants below deck.

During the early evening hours, drunken men play fiddles and drunken women try their hand at dancing.  The weight of the booze on board doubles the weight of the passengers, but the amount of booze on the floor triples the amount in the glasses.  It's a wild sight, a sight that Sorcha hasn't seen since her family passed, and she can't stop smiling.

That is, until a boy her own age or so thinks to make her acquaintance.  He can barely stand upright when he offers her his hand and asks, "A dance, lass?"

He's drunk as a skunk and twice as smelly and his face is a brilliant shade of red.

"Not a chance," Sorcha rebukes and a bellowing laughter roars from somewhere in the distance.  Both turn to find a heavy-set fellow slamming his drink down onto the counter top roughly.  It's a wonder the glass doesn't break.

"Feckin' sheep shaggers."

Sorcha just laughs, though, returning the Irishman's attention to his failed dance proposal.  "Y'ain't much better yerself there, fella."

\- - -

Sorcha's fifteen years old when her feet, half-bare through the worn leather soles, touch American soil.

It's a land of opportunity, full of promise for an honest working life and a family.  It's a big, empty land and every single body stepping off that boat has come to cut their own slice of that pie.  She's no different, of course, that wide-eyed girl standing on the American shore.

"Scotty!"  Calls that irritating Irishman.  "Ya made it!"

Turning, Sorcha finds the motley crew she met on the boat ride over.  The heftier Welshman fellow they'd met night after night, often on the brink of a fight, and a lankier man with a thin face who only called himself 'French'.  That, Sorcha thinks, is when the names stuck.

"That ain't the surprisin' part, fella."

Despite the curt response, she finds herself relieved to see that everyone made it through the strict screening process for all new American hopefuls.  Given their various assortment of afflictions, it's a true surprise.

"Welsh-y here's been talkin' 'bout an oil business south o' here," Irish explains proudly, though the idea is far too complex for either of them to have come up with on their own.  "We's thinkin' of checkin' it out t'gether, if ya wanna tag along."

It's not like Sorcha has any other plans for her great American adventure, and who knows - maybe they'd find themselves a small community along the way and settle down into some real honest work.

It couldn't hurt to try.

"Yeah," she says, offering a shrug of her shoulders.  "I'd like that."

\- - -

It had never been the picturesque life that Sorcha had envisioned on the boat ride to America, but somewhere along the way she'd made the best friends a person could ask for and lived a life - most often on the run - well worth living.

For years they were young and wild and carefree.

It didn't matter where they were going or why, so long as they were never standing still for longer than a day.  At one time they thought to touch every corner of this great country, leaving no stone unturned in their travels, and in doing so they were living the American dream.

"Watch the road, ya damn fool!"  Sorcha hollers at the Irishman as he nearly steers the wagon right into the ditch.  He's got the reins in one hand and the whiskey in the other.  "Maybe ya oughta get outta the way 'n' let me do it."

But Irish just giggles like a little girl and Welsh, riding shotgun, fires his revolver at the various critters that scurry out of the wagon's path.  Wherever they go, incident seems to follow like a shadow... and more often than not, it's that hot-headed Welshman's fault.

"You's just scared," Irish says and Sorcha sits back down in defeat.

Once Irish has the reins, there's no way to win.

"Pischouette's right, podna."  French, who's been asleep for most of the journey, offers a gap-toothed smile.  "Ya drive like a God damned couyon.  Let the little woman show ya how it's done before ya kill us all."

\- - -

It was only years later that Sorcha Hardie would learn French wasn't really French at all, but Cajun, and his name was Leander Holland.  Likewise, that ol' brute Welsh was born Alwyn Lloyd, though he really _was_ a Welshman...

And the Scotsman sits slumped up against an old wooden outhouse in the Thieves' Landing outpost.

People who come and go from here are less than desirable company, but somehow it's the one place she keeps coming home to.  No matter how far she goes - no matter how strongly she desires to start anew and leave it all behind - she finds herself right back in Thieves' Landing.

It had been her dream to leave Scotland, even as a wee baby, but she could never in her wildest dreams have imagined the sorts of trouble she'd find herself in when she finally reached the land of opportunity.

She's a petty thief and a swindler, having learned to hunt on the road because none of the drunken fools she called friends could shoot worth a damn.  They were a bunch of runaways, strays with nowhere to go once they finally got themselves out from trouble.

But trouble was all they'd ever known.

It wasn't the peaceful life of home and family and honest hard work she thought it'd be, yet she grew to love those idiots more than any home or family proper.  With loving comes losing, though, and while they might have ridden out their glory days longer than most, it had always been eventual.

Sorcha Hardie hadn't seen Irish in just over three years when she pressed a coin into that man's gloved hand and snatched up her purchase before she could be robbed.

She was only flipping through to browse those witty advertisements when the bold print jumped out at her.

Now, remembering neither who she is nor why she's here, the Scotsman sits alone and drinks herself blind by the old outhouse.

She sits and she drinks.  She drinks and she talks - talking to no one in particular, though she talks with a fond cheerfulness when she finds something coherent to say.  She smiles and she cries and she gets a serious look on her face.  She drinks and she heaves and she drinks some more until most nights she passes out for entire days at a time.

Sorcha had never noticed until it was too late, but by accepting the love she was shown, she bottlenecked her own fate into a life she'd spent so long trying to avoid.

Leaning back and closing her eyes, the redhead grows lax as a cool breeze rolls in from the lake.  The sun is warm, she thinks, because she can feel it warming her cold, numb skin.  A bottle sits, tipped, running burgundy into the fabric of her trousers, but she doesn't care about any of that.

Not anymore.

 **The Blackwater Ledger**  
Miscellany

_The body of a woman of Scottish descent was discovered in the early morning hours by a drunken local at the outhouse in Thieves' Landing.  The bottle found in her lap indicates a likelihood of alcohol poisoning, with no visible external injuries._


End file.
